Fight the state - even with corrected spelling errors!

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Resist, Rebel, Reclaim!

A month or so ago I conceived — no doubt, not originally — the idea of incorporating a revolutionary anarchist slogan into the traditional logo for recycling. I posted something to my Facebook wall calling for a logo design, and Alex had this put together in almost no time. Bravo, Alex! So, whether you see this plastered all up and down the overpasses on America’s Interstate 95 or spray-painted on half the train cars on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, you’ll know where it came from.

Resist! Resist what? Whatever evil there is in your situation and that of those around you. Could be the state, abusive parents, tyrannical schoolteachers, a smarmy boss, the jealous priesthood of whatever religion got jammed down your throat, stupid laws, uncaring “friends”, racism, sexism, whatever. Push back!

Rebel! Against same.

Reclaim! Reclaim what? Whatever has been taken from you and those around you. Could be your freedom, your identity, your learning, your labor, your mind, your property, your integrity, your emotions, your destiny, your life, whatever. Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait for critical mass, just take it!

Formats available: black-on-white PNG, white-on-black PNG, and for handy cut-out stencils, large-format billboards or whatever: black-on-white SVG, white-on-black SVG.

Almost 20 years ago, at the muddled dawn of my political awakening, I took a road trip from Orlando, Florida to Washington, DC with a few friends intent on joining one protest or another against the first Gulf War. My car was literally festooned with anti-war, pro-peace graffiti, bumper stickers and slogans — a rolling billboard for anti-war protest.

Late at night during the journey we stopped off for food and a break from the road at a Waffle House or Shoney’s in a tiny little town in South Caroline called Paxville. The perfect stopping place, one might think, given that the Latin word “pax” means “peace”, and wasn’t that just what we were after?

So we ate our meals and drank our coffees. About mid-way through, a small group of young men came in to dine as well, looking at us suspiciously and having conversations with a waitress in hushed tones. Cold stares all around. One of my friends noticed an insignia or patch on something one of the guys was wearing that suggested he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. Potential conflict ahead, and under the surreptitious appraisal and venomous looks we finished our meals quickly, full of tension that this group might decide to provoke some sort of conflict.

We got back in the car and made ready to continue the long drive to DC. As I pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, one of my friends said that the CAP guys were hustling out of the restaurant and piling into a Camaro. I got us out onto the deserted, dark county road, heading back for the highway, but about 500 yards from the restaurant I and my friends spotted the Camaro’s headlights behind us. The CAP guys were accelerating quickly to close the gap between us. I made a snap decision to evade them; if they wanted to start trouble out here at 4 o’clock in the morning without another soul in sight, we would likely have our faces pulped and the car damaged. Spotting an unfenced field filled with tall grass and weeds ahead, I switched off my headlights and plunged into it, with the Camaro now maybe 200 yards behind. A short, reckless, bumpy ride into the field in darkness, and I used engine braking and the hand brake (to avoid brake lights betraying our position) to bring us to a stop a goodly distance off the road. I shut off the car, and we watched the Camaro pass slowly, take a U-turn a ways up the road past our location and circle back looking for us before making a final U-turn and continuing on their way.

After catching our breath a while and agreeing upon what had just happened, we all shared a laugh about the name “Paxville” and got ourselves back on the highway to continue on.

This close encounter with violence was part of a tapestry of counter-protest that we experienced nearly everywhere. “Support the troops, oppose the war” on our side and “America, love it or leave it!” on the other, backed by the barely-controlled fury of some in the opposite camp eager to bait us into violent confrontation.

I was just reminded of this old tale of Paxville on discovering and reading another follow-on fisking to my “Fuck the Troops!” article. It’s by one W.B.B. Johnson and entitled “OUR TROOPS…MY HERO’S! DON’T LIKE IT…THEN GO TO HELL!“. A long screed with a surfeit of apostrophes and all-caps invective ends on this note:

No one (especially our troops) likes war. Atrocities (which no one wants to have happen) do happen in war… IT’S WAR!! To call our troops murderer’s… is TOTALLY… UNACCEPTABLE and beyond reason! The cracker-ass-joker that wrote this article: http://www.nostate.com/77/fuck-the-troops/, would have been hung for treason against AMERICA… had General George Washington been here today!

What Mr. Johnson doesn’t seem to get is that if I were transplanted into the history he romanticizes here, I might indeed be hung for treason — by the British.

It is one measure of the relative success of the American state’s indoctrination program that so few would be able to make that qualification correctly.

McClatchy yesterday kicked off a series of reports on the people held at the US Guantánamo Bay military prison and elsewhere, saying:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

"Guantamo Graffiti" by burge5000 @ flickr.com

From Sunday’s article, We got the wrong guys: America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men,

Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

And from today’s, ‘I guess you can call it torture’: U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases:

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that’s used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

[...]

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He’d been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was “falling apart” and had “basically been pulpified,” said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation.”